Last Weekend, I spent Saturday Morning volunteering my time with students from my son's charter school, Mountainville Academy. I hosted a workshop on the fun and accessible multimedia project/game factory called Scratch.
We went for 3 hours in smaller instructional periods, followed by hands on time. In my opinion, it was all very successful. We covered nearly half of the scratch blocks in the time allotted, and I could begin to see some nice projects coming along.
During that time, one of the students mentioned another game making software package called 'Game Maker', hosted at YoYo Games. I downloaded it and began playing with it a little bit. It had some truly brilliant features that were definitely missing from Scratch. However, it does appear less accessible than Scratch. I.e. I think Scratch hits my 5th graders really well, producing good projects in just a few hours. GameMaker is meant for High Schoolers and beyond, it would seem.One thing I liked though, were some of the tutorials, including this one: What is a good game. I recommend that if you are in my class, you read it. It will help guide you in your game creation so that after you spend all that time building the game, people will want to spend time playing it.
For those in my class, I want to see all of your scratch projects. I have created a scratch gallery called Mountainville Academy projects located here. Take a moment to take a look at some of the projects there, and to put your own in there as well. I'll see you all on Halloween!
